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What are some good influences for kids today, both online and offline?
I don't have kids, but I'm wondering about success stories parents have had with raising theirs in this sometimes scary world. Online, we hear about brainrot and inappropriate Youtube videos, and social media horror stories, and some of that could be massively overblown, I have no idea
So to flip that around, what are some good ways people have found comfortable having their kids spend their time?
(I don't have kids, but:)
Whatever you believe is a good influence.
You should curate a library, preferrably on your hard drive, and just give your kids access to it. Most parents age-gate stuff. Don't do that, unless there is a clear benefit, such as: "I am not prepared to deal with night terrors this week, so no Se7en before bed."
If you inspect IMDB TOP100 movies, I can't find a bad one. Some require a chat afterwards. Some pretty extensive one, but over half is instantly watchable.
Various kids shows such as MLP:FiM or Ducktales are pretty safe, but watch out for historical mores. Disney is mostly safe, but they are only as liberal and emancipatory as mainstream allowed them to be. So try to concentrate on Brave as opposed to Beauty and the Beast, I guess?
As for real-time influences, there are national TV stations in most developed nations. There are also various kids magazines, but those tend to sell stuff via ads. Tread carefully and get ready for nagging.
Then there is the kids library section. Just filter it on-the-fly I guess? Parents around me seem to just let kids loose on the local library selection and make sure to teach proper library etiquette.
There are various after school clubs and scouting. At least in Europe. As someone who runs a club, I say those are pretty good way for your kids to meet people outside their classroom and family. Attending some (not too many), preferrably one where the kid has the time and opportunity to bond with other kids, is a must. It gives them a social space where they don't play out their usual role forced on them by the classroom hierarchy. Just don't oversubscribe them and/or force them to go.
Do buy them computer games. Real ones, not phone ones. Singleplayer ones. Subnautica. Horizon. Life is Strange. That kind of stuff. Most are better than a movie and some are even better than a book.
Used laptop is 10x better than a new iPhone or a console. Always buy stuff that can be used to create, rather than stuff designed for quick consumption. Medium is the message, too.
As someone who does have kids, I disagree with this. :) I know you cite restricting Se7en, but you specify "not before bed" instead of no se7en at all.
There is zero reason a young kid should be watching movies with heads in boxes or, in general, movies that are intensely sexual, violent, or scary.
Every human needs to learn how to cope with the fact that there's darkness in the world and part of one's job as a parent is to prepare them for that. But the emphasis in that sentence is that it's part of the parent's job, not something to be handled by giving children unrestricted access to media with no age controls. (I know you said to curate a library, but my point is that a movie library which contains R-rated horror films is functionally unrestricted access to media.)
Maybe I'm being overly pedantic here. If so, sorry! This post is partially coming as a reaction to lots of parenting advice given online by people who don't have kids and primarily think of things - not saying this is you, by the way! - in terms of how they wish their parents had interacted with them.
But a lot of times that childlike frustration at having things restricted from us is actually what you're trying to set the stage for, as a parent. Just because we wanted things as children doesn't mean that it would've been good for us to get them: the thing is that every adolescent in history has felt more mature than they actually were. It's literally developmentally appropriate.
I am a parent and I provide media for my kid and the space for him to bow out if something is "too scary". I usually probe if I have a sneaking suspicion, but I don't really allow my child to watch things like game of thrones or saw.
To add some light, I'm not a stickler either. I grew up on unfettered access to the "wild west" internet that was the 90s and early 2000s. I don't want my kid to go through that, but I have let him sit down with me to play World of Warcraft. He's made a character and it's a "controlled" environment. It was very cute, last time we played (which is very infrequently), he wanted to not "fight" anything because the quest said to slay pigs. But he stated "pigs are friends!".
All of this is to say, nothing about early wow is overly graphic or scary. He seems to enjoy it occasionally and it lets him practice interacting with a mouse and keyboard.
I think it's all about being attuned to what you think your kid can handle and asking frequently what they think and going with that flow. I didn't force my kid to slay the boars! Instead, we explored the dwarven cities around us, and had a blast.
BBC Children's TV is awesome. I don't feel the need to supervise my kid when they watch BBC, although I usually end up sitting and watching with them anyway because it's just so good.
My kid is very physically active and one of the best influences on them is Sam Pilgrim (ex world freeride MTB champion) who does crazy stuff but does it safely, and (mostly) legally, unlike some of the other Youtube bike/scooter people. Pilgrim's attitude of "That looks scary, let's do it! Yikes, it was scary, let's do it again but better this time!" has helped my kid in quite a lot of situations, not all of which are at the top of large drops on their bike (but some are)
Youtube can be good with a guiding hand. Google have mostly, as far as I can tell, dealt with the weird "kids" videos of a few years ago, but there's still a lot of brainrot which is just... stupid stuff. My kid has their own account which I manage through Family Link, which mostly means going through every so often and blocking all the inane bullshit accounts. There's still plenty of goodness out there though. Today we watched a great video in which a guy built a series of increasingly detailed lego "hideouts" which prompted Kid to get their lego out and build some stuff too. We also had an imaginative discussion about where we could make secret lego bases in our world, which was fun.
Books. Obviously. Some books are better than others but books books books. We go to the library at least once a week and Kid chooses books for them to read and for me to read with them. Last week we had one about "How to be a Real Man" which was awesome because it was "fuck gender roles, just be nice and do what makes you happy" but really fun with it and without being boring and preachy.
Mostly though, at the age I've been dealing with (kid was 7 last week), the main influencers are us - their parents. So we try to be everything we want them to be. Kind, compassionate, gentle, thoughtful, enthusiastic, silly, polite, curious and so on. I know this won't be the case forever and later in life I can only hope kid finds good friends who will take them further along that path. The friends they have now are mostly decent kids and they all look out for each other and call out bullying and unkindness when they see it. I actually have a lot of hope for The Kids as a group, I live near several schools and I on the school walk I overhear so much thoughtfulness and compassion among kids of all ages, even the teenagers (who were utter dicks when I was one of them). The number of times my kid does a tiny jump on their scooter or micro-wheelie on their bike and a bunch of big kids unironically cheer for them makes me really happy.
In terms of media our kids mostly see stuff from the public Danish national tv station. They have a lot of good high quality programs, that are more tuned to Danish society and culture than the very commercial kids shows on Netflix.
We also recently got a subscription for a weekly kids newspaper. They cover the same news as other newspapers, but of course with an angle aimed at 8-13 year olds. Everything from K-Pop Hunters to drone hybrid warfare.
We also frequently read various Danish children books that resemble ordinary families in a fun way, so there is something to recognize. And if we can’t read to them, they can listen to it in audiobook format. In general audiobooks is a great alternative to screen time, though it clearly doesn’t have the same attraction. But we try to encourage reading, including comic books, or listening as something they can do practically limitless, compared to time limited screen time. Honestly, not as successful as I would like though.
I second this. There are quite a few very good publications for kids. Our kids read and re-read them, and take care of the fragile magazines as well or if not better than their books :b
There are a lot of very good podcasts for kids. The one we have listened to the most is called Noodleloaf, which is a "music education podcast" that is very fun and well done.
I think when it comes to any kind of media, whether it is good or bad, making it social goes a long way. I mean, just casually binging stuff on a small screen is not great. But we read, watch, and listen to a lot of stuff together. Not all of it is stuff that I would have wanted my kids to watch (not that it is inappropriate but more just... meh), but having an opportunity to communicate about it is important. Not that my opinion is authoritative, but I always call out senselessly sexist content or things like that even just in passing. It is a crazy wild world out there, and surely they will get exposed to weird things in their peer groups. It is good for them to have a sense about what is bueno and what is not.
It is and it isn't. The internet has always had a lot of awful/inappropriate stuff in it, and that will probably never change. Talking about young kids, I think the biggest issue is when parents let them watch stuff unsupervised. You must, must, must actively engage with what your kid is watching - especially online. I'm not saying you need to sit and watch it with them (though you really should do that whenever possible), but you need to have a hand in what they're watching. If you just let youtubekids autoplay, it's going to serve your kid abysmal brainrot nonsense, and I've got to imagine that things are only getting worse with AI.
In a lot of ways I think things get harder as your kids get older. For youngish (ages ~6-13) kids, I think the biggest thing is to keep your kids away from some of the MMO games that are super popular, but which are absolute nightmares from a parenting standpoint. Roblox is probably the biggest current offender, but there were others before and there will be new ones in the future. I think it's important to try to keep your kid away from these sorts of mixed media until they are as old as possible, and then you probably need to sit with them while they play for a year or two.
Teens need to learn to engage with the internet as mature adults, and obviously they'll never get there if you're watching over their shoulder at every second... but also, parts of the internet are horrible -- as an 80s kid, I saw a lot of that -- and teens need to be sheltered from them. (Nobody needs to watch snuff clips.) Our kids aren't teens yet, but I think the only real solution is to:
I haven't really figured out how to deal with internet pornography yet. I wouldn't care at all if it was just titillating pictures (which is more or less how I grew up), but the internet now is full of highdef video of really intense content, which I think is really damaging to teens in the throes of peak sexual development (see: the insane rise of choking during sex among young adults.) I also worry about AI-generated pornography -- overconsumption of regular porn already risks giving one crazy ideas about what bodies should look like, sex should be like, etc. and I've got to imagine that AI-generated pornography is going to make that a thousand times worse. (If anybody has figured out how to handle this, please let me know.)
Parenting can be a shitload of work. But any parent has a responsibility to their children to put in that work to raise them as well as possible.
Non media offerings, in no particular order:
Girl Guides / Boy Scouts; cadets¹; hobby classes for whatever the kid is interested in; community volunteering; a good religious organization²; sports or extracurriculars, but only those you can well easily afford and have time for; extended family, teachers, school counsellors3.
If your kid is struggling with one small aspect or a few areas, health care team:
Occupational therapists cover executive functioning (goal setting, time management, organization, stress management, losing things etc). There are also ones who specialize in balance and coordination, tasks like tying shoe laces, handwriting, holding utensils and severely sucking at all sports, etc. OTs for sensory processing can help with noise and weird fabric and food texture being terrible, or picky eating or eating of not food, lighting at home, even choosing clothing, wall paint and the family cars.
Speech language pathologist don't just talk about stutters or selective mutism or accents or inability to enunciate clearly. They're also resources for how to read social cues, how to present yourself in a social setting, why others kids have weird thoughts about me, how I can not attracted the attention of bullies, learn how to "read the room" and how one can tell if others are being manipulative, aggressive or deceptive.
Dietician can greatly help with having an adult listen to you and empathize with the picky eater(s) in your family, strategies for making and eating more nutritious foods, how to pack lunches or for outings etc.
Mental health team and pediatrician of course.
Basically if you have struggles, there's a kind of specialist out there to help, that your extended health probably already covers. The parents' role is to provide care, and sometimes that looks like librarian or researcher to find specialists who can help.
'¹ your country's program may vary. Ours are very minimally military-ish, and our actual armed forces are known for peacekeeping instead of erh, warmongering. It's more about pretending to adhere to hierarchy, dressing respectfully in context, listening and being attentive in order to be organized, and then sports extracurriculars like camping, survival, flying gliders, shooting guns and archery etc.
'² I understand religion can be controversial here, I'm specifically talking about a good one, under "trust but verify" watch from parents. You can mentally fill in an atheist church or satanic temple here if you want, I won't argue with you
3 -- family is a tough one. So many people move away from family for work and/or unhelpful/toxic family dynamics. But I wanted to recognise them anyway as a potential source of good influence. Ditto school staff: they're stretched so thin these days I'm unsure if the baseline is still of as good quality as in my day